RFC 1035, Section 2.3.1 sez: The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less. Given that "domain names" in this context refers to individual SLD's, there are significantly fewer than 254x256 "domain names" available. According to RFC 1035, there are exactly 26*37^61*36 (428135279974248253859698166549001\ 968236527812977171075381544952036285878331983282604984379776447432) labels available. While this certainly is a finite resource, the likelihood of it being exhausted is zero considering the money supply is not large enough to cover the cost of registering those labels, even at the new wholesale rate (and one cannot raise the velocity to compensate, considering the turnaround time on registrations at the current number of registrations); one can then conclude that labels are therefore an infinite resource for all practical purposes. ObRandy: no ip name-server Stephen | | Stephen Sprunk, K5SSS, CCIE #3723 :|: :|: NSA, Network Consulting Engineer :|||: :|||: 14875 Landmark Blvd #400; Dallas, TX .:|||||||:..:|||||||:. Pager: 800-365-4578 / 800-901-6078 C I S C O S Y S T E M S Email: ssprunk@cisco.com -----Original Message----- From: Randy Bush <rbush@bainbridge.verio.net> To: Austin Schutz <tex@shrubbery.net> Cc: nanog@merit.edu <nanog@merit.edu> Date: Thursday, April 29, 1999 18:19 Subject: Re: Wasted space

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Equally exciting was the discovery that a large portion of space is maintainer-free

in the irr or (arin|ripe|apnic)?

much of the the former thanks to sean and to baby peter. the latter should not be the case.

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IMO this seems much like those people who hoard domain names, except worse because ipv4 space is finite.

domain names are finite. 254 char limit drawn from an 8-bit char set.

randy